Broadband News

BT Wholesale answer some questions

In an attempt to obtain some answers for topics that keep cropping up in our forums, we put a short list of questions to BT Wholesale. Here is a summary of the questions with their answers - a full
set can be seen in the BT Wholesale forum.

The new exchange trigger levels of 650/700/750 what is the cost on these exchanges?

It is a huge investment to upgrade an exchange - some are more than £500,000 and we will not make this investment unless we have a committed demand for it.

What is it that costs so much that means some exchanges have triggers of 200 and others 750?

Exchanges with higher trigger levels indicate a higher cost to upgrade the exchange.

There are rumours that BT Wholesale are to stop publishing the trigger levels, are there any plans to do this?

We have not made any commitment to stop the pre-registration scheme. The future rollout programme is confirmed as this process but we do continually review this to ensure we maximise its
effectiveness.

If the exchange at Penn (67 out of 200 registrations) reached its trigger point in October (at current rate not impossible) - what would be a likely date for when the first ADSL
line went active on it?

When demand reaches the threshold for a particular exchange BT Wholesale will inform service providers who will have 42 days to convert registrations into advance orders. When the number of
orders confirmed meets required levels, and other technical criteria met, the exchange will be included in the build programme for ADSL deployment. It is expected that around 3 months, typically,
will be required to build, test and commission an exchange once the advance orders have met the required level within the 6 weeks.